With such a large amount of Facebook marketing waste occurring in the automotive industry, knowing how to properly advertise on Facebook can give your dealership a huge leg up on the competition. Here are four effective ways to lower your social media marketing ad costs to improve the performance of your Facebook campaigns. Let’s get started!

Inspect Facebook Ad Placements

The first step to lowering Facebook ad costs and improving ad and campaign performance is inspecting your ad placements. How is this done?

From your Ad Manager go to: Breakdown > By Delivery > Placement.

You can see the placements shown for your campaigns, ad sets, and ads when Placement is selected.

From here, you’ll want to customize your Facebook ads for each placement type. Doing so will allow you to build optimized marketing ads for specific placements – depending on your goals. This is helpful when you want to optimize and focus on mobile-specific placements, for example.

Test Facebook Bid Strategy

Another tip for setting up an effective Facebook ad campaign is testing your bid strategy. There are THREE steps to this ad optimization process that can help lower social media marketing ad costs and ensure you’re getting the best performance:

1. Set your campaign goal to conversions

Why should you choose conversions as a campaign goal? The reason is that you want the user to take specific valuable actions on your website. These can include engagement events or hard conversions such as:

desktop phone calls

mobile click to calls

form submissions

chat messages

SMS/text messages

Any on-page action can be tracked using the Facebook pixel. The Facebook pixel is prompted once a website visitor takes a pre-defined action and reports it. This activity happens seamlessly behind the scenes so you can build a custom audience around the action taken. As the audience continues to grow, you can reach more potential customers who have completed the same specific action. Your social media marketing ads are now better suited for this audience. This is how your campaigns become more effective and ultimately convert more opportunities – increasing performance.

Tip: get creative with the events you want to track. Imagine serving Facebook marketing ads to website visitors who engaged with your service specials for a tire offer, for example.

2. Ensure Facebook ad delivery strategy is set for conversions

You can do this by going to Budget & Schedule > Optimization for Ad Delivery > Conversions. I recommend choosing this option because you want to match the campaign objective (conversions) you selected earlier.

3. Select Target Cost as your Facebook Bid Strategy

Selecting this option gives you the chance of landing better placement opportunities at a higher price/range than if you chose the Lowest Cost option. With the Lowest Cost option, your budget might limit/prevent you from achieving better placements.

Daypart Ad Delivery

The third ad optimization tip when setting up your Facebook marketing campaigns involves choosing which day and time of day you want your ads to run. This is especially useful in improving overall campaign performance. To find this: go to Budget & Schedule > budget menu > Lifetime Budget.

From there, you’ll want to set the start and end dates of your campaign. This is found by going to Ad Scheduling > Run Ads on a Schedule > Pick Days/Times.

After you’ve chosen your start and end dates, find the best times to run ads. Do this from the Facebook Ads dashboard > Reports > Select All > Time of Day (Viewer).

This might require some experimentation, but base your decisions on when you see the most traffic from your ads. (Example: If you see your highest traffic on an advertisement for a 2019 Jeep Wrangler at 10am-12pm, consider targeting those time slots.)

Discover the best performance times by comparing clicks, costs, conversions, and leads. You’ll notice in the example below that we circled in green the best times THIS account would want to display ads. Compare these times with those circled in red. See the difference?

PRO TIP: Instead of choosing Standard for Delivery Type, choose Accelerated. This option shows ads faster during peak hours, which means you’ll display ads to MORE people when they’re online. Be careful though and WATCH YOUR BUDGET! Choosing this setting can result in ad budgets being spent quicker. I recommend experimenting with this once you’re confident with your ad and audience settings

Edit Custom & Lookalike Audiences

When creating your custom and lookalike audiences, it’s always a best practice to exclude certain people if they don’t fall into your targeted audience(s). For example, if you’re selling a high-end luxury vehicle, you probably don’t want to spend money on people aged 18-21 when older ages are more likely to buy the car advertised.

Most importantly, review your results and experiment. Remember, there isn’t a one size fits all solution that works for every dealership. What works for one dealership audience might not work for another. Experiment with your Facebook audiences, ad creative, and campaign settings to fit what works best for you. Keep measuring the activity to create baselines and to improve your Facebook marketing campaigns continuously.

Better Performance, Lower Costs

Arm yourself with the right tools to build BETTER performing Facebook ad campaigns at LOWER costs with these four tips in your marketing arsenal. Note: these four tips are also essential items to ask about if a vendor manages your social media marketing.

Managing social media marketing campaigns can be hard and takes a lot of time. It doesn’t have to be that way.